Hello, Soto

When DCG Open, an annual survey of unrepresented South Florida-based artists, opens Saturday at David Castillo Gallery, Misael Soto will be sitting on the gallery's floor looking at a laptop or walking around the space while texting on a smart phone. To achieve his latest goal — to get people at an art show to actually discuss the art — he'll only communicate through a computer or a phone. Signs on the wall will advise visitors how to contact him. “I'll only use text-based forms of communication, so no calls — just texting, tweeting, Facebook, e-mail, blog and Foursquare,” he says. “I won't talk at all, ignoring people if they come up to me.” His electronic communications only will concern art.

Soto has done his homework, e-mailing questions to the show's other 27 artists about their work, careers, goals and opinions of the art market. Soto can tell you, for example, that the song artist Orlando Estrada feels best describes his current state of mind is pop singer Monica's “Don't Take It Personal” and that “the online thing” Estrada feels best represents him is an image of Moby Dick. Soto has even memorized the layout of the gallery so that he can guide visitors through it via text messages when he's not there.

While Soto's performance is refreshingly different than many gallery offerings, it's not a drastic departure from the works he's created since June 2010. That's when Soto began to turn occasionally solitary activities — such as driving, listening to music, texting or watching television — into communal happenings.

The Fort Lauderdale artist, who earned his bachelor's degree in art history at Florida Atlantic University, has taken strangers for car rides at sunset and danced and sung along to tunes gallery visitors selected from his iPod. Occasionally, he's packed up a television, folding chairs and beer and headed to Wynwood's Second Saturday Art Walk. Once there, he powered the television using his car battery, arranged the chairs on the sidewalk around the TV and turned on movies such as Psycho and 2001: A Space Odyssey while cracking open beers from his cooler and waiting for passers-by to join him.

While Soto has experimented in other media, such as painting and drawing, he never considered himself an artist until he began presenting what he calls “performatives,” “situations” or “participatory performances.”

“I was trying to figure out a method to share because I feel like that's what artists do — share themselves with others,” he says. “A photographer would photograph things they find interesting or special, and then create this dialogue with whoever will look at [the photo].” As an artist, Soto wants to share things he finds special, like a movie, song or drive at sunset.

Even though he appears to have an outgoing personality, Soto says he suffers from severe social anxiety, which he mitigates by performing his stunts. As a kid, he was always starting clubs and enlisting kids to play games he and his brother dreamed up. But by adolescence, he had become extremely shy. “It was a way to protect myself as my peers got harsher,” he recalls. “I wanted to be more outgoing, but I was too scared.”

The feeling lingers. “It seems like everybody else is so sure of themselves, and I never feel that at all,” he says. “Under the guise of 'art,' I can force myself to be more vulnerable than usual.”

That vulnerability resonates, particularly with some of the people who participate in his performances. When Zachary Ordonez saw a parked blue car with a sign beside it at Second Saturday Art Walk last summer, he assumed the car was an artwork. A closer inspection of the sign revealed otherwise: It advised volunteers to meet at the car for Soto's Sunset Joy Ride. “The art piece was to take a ride with [Soto],” Ordonez explains. “I was impressed and intrigued because it dealt with inviting strangers into his car to enjoy a beautiful moment — something he had experienced and would now share.” Ordonez didn't hesitate to become Soto's first — and on that trip, only — passenger.

Soto, a curatorial associate and design and Web coordinator at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, has presented four Sunset Joy Rides in all, including one that attracted five chatty passengers. “I always put down the windows, and it's like sensory overload, the imagery, the wind, the music,” he says. “They're always so different.”

Soto sings along to his iPod at 18 Rabbit Gallery.

People who have seen his performances likely would agree. In January, Soto entered 18 Rabbit Gallery and stood behind a sign that held his iPod and read, “What would you like me to sing for you? Visitors are invited to choose songs for the artist to sing.”

Because Soto sang along to the songs while wearing headphones, people would hear only his voice. Until someone picked the first song, the headphone-clad artist stood in place and sang songs he'd chosen in advance. When two people finally selected songs for him to sing, the mood of the room changed.

“I don't know if by then they already had enough to drink or what it was,” Soto says. “I'm always trying to figure out what makes people take that leap. After that, it became like a concert hall. People just sat down in groups and wanted to test me to see which songs I could sing for them and which ones were the goofiest. By the end of it, it was packed.”

Artist AdrienneRose Gionta took part in "I Can't See You but I Can Feel You," a project Soto presented earlier this year in Wynwood and at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale. Participants stood silently for two hours, facing walls with their eyes closed. The goal was to transform the idea of turning one's back on people into an act of trust and “invitation for interaction.” No instructions were offered to passers-by, but a set of white vinyl footprints behind each participant encouraged people to stand back-to-back with them.

“I had people talking around me, trying to figure out what I was doing and what it meant,” Gionta says. “People telling me I was crazy, some mooing because of my size, a knock-knock joke to try to get me to laugh and some men telling me I had a great big juicy ass. I could even feel people try to get as close to me as possible to see my face. Many stood back-to-back with me, some with hands against mine, some taking my hands in theirs. I think the longest someone stood with me was 20 minutes or so. I became very aware of everything around me.”

Soto performs "I Can't See You but I Can Feel You" in Wynwood. (Photo by Robby Campbell/Beachedmiami.com)

Soto plans to hold participatory performances in settings other than art walks and galleries and to make them more site-specific. “The David Castillo Gallery thing is kind of a first, where I am trying to be truer to the place I am in,” Soto says. Rather than bring unrelated performances into a gallery or art space, he wants to subvert the experiences people already have in these venues.

“I am also trying to do less in institutional spaces,” he adds. “This summer on the beach, I want to have a huge beach blanket made out of 50 normal-size beach blankets and roll it out onto the busiest part of South Beach or wherever I can find ahead of time and have enough beer and sun block and all the usual things for people and see what happens.”

He hopes people will join in and take the beach blankets home. “That's continuing the idea of subverting ways people block themselves off from others in public social settings, like their beach blanket is their space, like “This is mine. My real estate. I claim it,” Soto says. “So if I claim it, I want to see if maybe they will join me.”

DCG Open will open 6-10 p.m. Thursday, July 7 and run through Aug. 6 at David Castillo Gallery, 2234 N.W. Second Ave., in Miami. Call 305-573-8110 or visit Davidcastillogallery.com.